Water fowl decoys which are made to resemble various water fowl such as ducks or geese have long been used by hunters to attract game to a particular area. Such decoys are generally made of wood or molded plastic and are placed in water to mimic the appearance of a flock of ducks or geese sitting in a lake, lagoon, cove, or other similar body of water. Since the decoys are motionless, such decoys are not particularly visible from the altitudes at which water fowl fly and therefore have limited success in attracting game.
Accordingly, a number of attempts have been made to introduce motion to water fowl decoys. Some conventional decoys are dragged by underwater systems to give the decoys the appearance of swimming about in the water. However, such conventional decoy systems have only limited success, apparently since the swimming motion is hardly perceptible to water fowl flying overhead at significant altitudes. Other conventional decoys employ elaborate mechanically driven wings to imitate the flapping of wings by a bird. Such flapping decoys are better at attracting game but suffer from the disadvantages of mechanical complexity and associated expense.
What is needed is a particularly simple and inexpensive mechanism by which motion resembling the flapping of a bird's wings is introduced to a bird decoy.